dracula

Damn. I remember starting this in middle school, sometime between all the ghost and UFO books and the Stephen King phase. I remember getting to the three weird sisters and being bored. It does drag in a 19th century way, though all the use of the archaic conditional tickled me, and I am glad the diary device has mostly lapsed.

I'm waiting, at this point, to find out how Jonathan Harker effected his escape, why Dracula killed off the crew that he needed to get him to England, why he wanted to go to England at all, why he needed 50 boxes of earth instead of just his one coffin, and why he youth-ified himself. Part of it is just obsolete storytelling, like whether Friday was a Dufflepud or how else he left a sole footprint on a wide beach, and part of it is vampire lore I've forgotten (like hairy palms--does masturbation make you undead?). And most of all how he can change his form to that of a dog--a bat, I can accept. I even can accept that as a bat he could not fly from the Carpathian Mountains across Europe and over the Channel to England. But I want to know why Bram Stoker so demonized dogs.

Mostly, I am at at this point cracking up at my bad self--Jonathan Harker, Mina Murray, John Seward, Quincy Morris, and Lord Godalming all follow Abraham van Helsing in a manner not unlike Stranger in a Strange Land's Jubal Harshaw's minions flocked after him, and they all lurv each other so much that I expect a one big happy Nest too. And ha! As Anne is a Fair Witness, cf Mina:

"I am told, Madam Mina, by my friend John that you and your husband have put up in exact order all things that have been, up to this moment."
"Not up to this moment, Professor,” she said impulsively, "but up to this morning."

Dracula travels as a human during daylight hours? He can attack only a willing victim, so why Mina? I remember while still in my Stephen King phase reading criticism of 'Salem's Lot, about how the boy is here described as small for his age and pages later as tall, and another continuity error now mercifully fallen out of my head. Maybe if Stoker's purpose was Suspense Is Good and Sex Is Bad, then the behavior of his monster isn't as important. Otherwise, if this is a seminal horror text, then maybe I should be more lenient to his legacy, including King. Nah.

All books are one book. Except that Stoker's doubting a woman's abilities is more forgiveable than Heinlein's.

Oo, even more books are one: van Helsing must "trepine" Renfield, and trepanning is Julian English's father's favorite surgery in Appointment in Samarra. Now there's been mention of both "elemental dust" and trepanning, but no, Dracula is not One Book with His Dark Materials, damn it.